The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  The mist, the rain, the rock wall, the vegetal growth, the microorganisms veiled from sight, all entered through the pulsations and cuts in my scratched and torn hands, and where I could not go I could only yield and be entered. The rain poured down my sleeves and neck and along my spine. The elements saturated me. All Pemako seemed to coalesce into the square foot of rock directly before me, and all its hidden depths were concealed only by my limited awareness and the mechanisms of mind itself.

  The surface of the rock seemed to be turning to water beneath my touch and my vision began to waver and become porous, like a veil lifting. I felt at the edge of something just out of reach, but even as this thought intruded the feeling passed, and I was again standing against the rock, now aware that a small misstep would send me plummeting into empty space.

  IN THE TERMA TRADITION, spiritual treasures often remain hidden until the terton meets with a consort who serves to open the subtle channels through which ordinary perception transforms into revelation, receiving through surrender what the mind can never grasp. Visualizing his paramour as a land of infinite promise and experiencing her eyes like the sun and moon and her limbs like celestial continents, the terton embraces the entire universe. In an unimpeded flow of energies larger than self or other, doors open into the hidden-lands of the heart that, like Yangsang, exist only in potential until realized in the fullest, fearless, unbounded expanse of one’s innermost being, beyond the productions of intellect or faith or divisions between what’s external and what’s internal. In the full openness of the unknown there are neither curtains nor doors, still less a need for any key. For the key is the surrender itself, and yearning for it elsewhere only seals the doors. As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land: “Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”

  WE WALKED ON THROUGH the enveloping mist, as thunder rumbled over the peak above. Having passed the climax of the pilgrimage, we came to a sanctioned urinal, marked by a pile of stones. Lifting up the multiple layers of his robes, Kawa Tulku relieved himself into the great beyond. Hamid emptied out the water bottle that he had filled earlier when he couldn’t hold it in any longer. Christiaan considered this a theological dilemma. “Strictly speaking, isn’t that cheating, Hamid? Maybe you’ve been causing this bad weather.”

  We ascended a fifty-foot cliff, which tradition dictates that one climb without using one’s hands. When my balance faltered I leaned against the cliff, grinning at the absurdity of the mission. Christiaan scrambled up using all four limbs, having decided that it was better to invoke the ire of the goddess than to fall to his death.

  At the top of the cliff we came to a small grassy platform at 14,500 feet that marked the border between the Valley of the Prophecy and Trakpo Kagye Ling, a region associated with eight wrathful Tantric deities. A lone prayer flag hung languidly beside a giant cube-shaped boulder. The very moment the last of the porters pulled themselves up onto the platform, a bolt of lightning seared through the clouds. The sky behind the boulder lit up brilliantly, illuminating us like a scene from some Wagnerian opera.

  Kawa Tulku was clearly unsettled by the synchrony. Christiaan worried out loud that his disregard for local protocol in ascending the short cliff had angered Kundu’s protector spirits. Hurriedly—we had become human lightning rods now—we descended from the electricity-saturated ledge into the fifth ling.

  In less than half an hour the trail opened into a grassy meadow encompassing a house-sized boulder draped with faded prayer flags. A worn track circled around the giant rock, which widened sharply from its base to create a natural overhang that proved welcome when the rain turned into a violent hailstorm and we gathered under its shelter.

  After the volley of hail had passed, Christiaan continued on with the porters and Hamid and I stayed back with Kawa Tulku. Circling the rock thirteen times is held to equal one kora around the entire mountain, Kawa Tulku told us. In accord with the arcane mathmatics of Tibetan pilgrimage, Kawa Tulku was eager to make up for the third kora that, due to the lateness in the day, he would not be able to complete. Hamid and I resolved to do the equivalent of two full koras around the mountain, twenty-six circuits around the monolithic rock.

  As we circled the boulder, the sky opened and shafts of sunlight perforated the clouds. A luminous thunderhead took shape over the lake at the base of the ling. Like a sculpture emerging from a block of marble, the full shape of Kundu, including the boxlike summit block, appeared as a reflection in the clouds of vapor rising from the lake. Kawa Tulku stood entranced.

  AT 7 p.m., WE STARTED DOWN through the sixth and final section of the kora—Pagmo Drodrul Ling. As we wound through a passage between the rocks, Oy appeared in front of us in her green Gore-Tex jacket. Undeterred by rain, hail, or thunder, and in her usual high spirits, she had chosen not to attempt the kora but to explore the mountain in her own way. She had wandered about not really knowing where she was or where she was headed. “I slipped through a kind of keyhole,” she said from beneath the hood of her parka.

  When she reached the lake beneath Kundu’s northern wall, a huge raptor had circled above her and, when it disappeared, she found an eagle’s feather lying at her feet. “I didn’t see any trail going to the left,” Oy said, “so I just followed the edge of the lake going to the right—the direction the bird had come from. I hadn’t gone far at all—just some sixty feet—when the sky began to cloud over. I kept moving and it began to rain and thunder and then turned into a hailstorm. The more the storm built up, the more energized I felt. But then I ran into the crazy nun coming from the other direction. She looked very concerned, and then I realized that I had been going around the mountain counterclockwise. As soon as I turned around and started going the other direction, the storm cleared up immediately. Within five minutes the sun was shining and a brilliant rainbow appeared right in front of me. What’s going on here?”

  As we descended through the slanting light toward the small shelter where we had left the silent yogi to his fate, banks of mist hovering over the lake in the valley far below slowly began to dissolve. Distant peaks appeared within an orange-and black-streaked sky as the sun lowered toward the distant ridges that we had descended on our approach to the mountain. As we gazed out over the vista of lakes and mountains, Kawa Tulku came from behind, beaming.

  As we approached the House of Clear Light, I reflected on the whole crazy journey that was both necessary and absolutely unnecessary at the same time. We’d traveled to the far ends of the earth in search of a key that—in truth—could be found anywhere. I recalled something Franz Kafka had written: “Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen; simply wait. Do not even wait; be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked; it has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

  WHEN WE REACHED THE SHELTER, we found the bearded yogi sitting crosslegged in the same position we had left him. His eyes sparkled in the firelight. He gave Hamid and me a thumbs-up sign with his right hand while his other fingers streamed over polished prayer beads. In his left hand he spun his prayer wheel.

  As the fire burned down to coals, I lay down in my sleeping bag. The sky had remained clear, and rare moonlight spilled down through the loosened roof boards. Oy’s voice rose out of the silver shadows: “In the novel Uma’s Diamond, the entry point to the lost valley appears when the crescent moon touches the tip of a mountain shaped like Uma’s breasts.” The glow of the embers mixed with moonlight as we drifted into dreamless sleep.

  Rinchenpung

  AT FIRST LIGHT ON AUGUST 19 , we left the House of Clear Light and descended to the lake where we found the Gillenwaters hovering around their campfire while two of the Sherpas were rolling up their tent. Gil’s Hulk Hogan frame had withered under his Gore-Tex parka. “I know that pilgrimage is about accepting whatever comes,” Gil said pensively, “but I’m still disappointed that we didn’t reach the mountain.”

  Hamid
attempted some esoteric consolation.

  “Gil, to know Dorje Pagmo you have to surrender to her completely. If you try to conquer or possess her, she will always elude you. Pemako isn’t a place you can seduce. The place seduces you.”

  “Thanks Hamid,” Gil said. He didn’t sound convinced.

  OUR NEXT DESTINATION WAS RINCHENPUNG , a temple perched above the lower Tsangpo valley in Dorje Pagmo’s topographical navel. To reach it, we had to cross the Zigchen-La, the Great Leopard Pass. With Yonten leading the way, we entered a morass of swamps and began climbing up a rocky defile.

  Gil had recovered sufficiently from his illness to question Hamid on nuances of Buddhist doctrine and the nature of pilgrimage. “All the Buddhist texts talk about duality,” Gil said. “Can you explain this to me?”

  Hamid had become more preoccupied by Oy, who had stopped to photograph the paw prints of a large tiger that had preceded us toward the pass. “They’re very fresh,” Oy said, “but the prints are probably all we will see.”

  Gil persisted. “Does it mean that whatever we see is actually taking place inside our heads and therefore does not really exist?”

  “Something like that,” Hamid responded, watching Oy as she sauntered up the trail. “Buddhist philosophy reveals that what appears as external and self-existing is ultimately a function of consciousness; it has no inherent existence. To say that reality is nondual doesn’t mean that all is illusion, but that appearances arise in conjunction with our perception. When we recognize that perception dictates our reality, the forces of greed, anger, and delusion lessen and we attain a freer responsiveness to the events around us.”

  “You mean we don’t get attached?”

  “Right, we just recognize them as the play of consciousness, a kind of virtual reality. This isn’t just artful fantasy,” Hamid continued. “Science recognizes the same thing; that reality does not exist separately from our perception.”

  “So what’s real then?” Gil asked. “Just this collective and intersecting delusion?”

  “No,” Hamid answered. “That’s the whole point of Buddhism—to wake up from this collective dream and to recognize that there are no inherent boundaries between external reality and the circuitry of consciousness. If we could live in full awareness of this nondual reality, there would no longer be any basis for alienation, greed, anger, fear, and all the other mental poisons that Buddhism speaks about. We would take responsibility for our own perceptions and begin to work with them, in full consciousness of our interconnectedness with other beings.”

  Gil remained pensive, digesting this bit of Buddhist wisdom.

  “I really wanted to reach that mountain, Hamid. But I can see that ultimately, it doesn’t really matter.”

  “That’s right, Gil, it’s actually just a mountain.”

  I HAD WALKED BEHIND, amused by the philosophical bent of their conversation. Christiaan had stopped beside the path to jot down insights in his journal. Oy walked ahead, scouting the ground for more signs of large cats, the raptor’s feather she’d found on Kundu dangling from her daypack.

  AT THE CREST OF THE ZIGCHEN-LA, the trail dropped precipitously into a morass of mist, mud, and stunted trees. Sinking halfway up to our knees, we descended on a path through towering bamboo, their joints ringed in half inch spikes. I cut one down to use as a staff and another one to bring back to Bhakha Tulku, who would fashion it into a shakuhachi-like flute.

  At dusk we came upon a crude shelter where Kawa Tulku and the advance porters had taken refuge. A small spring bubbled up from the earth. In the absence of any level earth, we formed precarious tent platforms from bent bamboo and slept suspended several feet above the ground. Gil’s voice boomed out from the yellow North Face dome tent he shared with his brothers: “You mean to tell me that all this is in my head, Hamid?”

  The following morning we continued the steep descent toward Rinchenpung. The forest became ever denser and higher, full of ficus trees, colossal rhododendrons, and blossoming magnolias garlanded with moss. Oy found delicate orchids growing on dark tree limbs. “There are more than 36,000 types of orchids in the world,” she announced with authority. “They are epiphytes. They grow on trees, but they get all their nourishment from air and rain.” Like lichen, however, orchids cannot exist without their fungal partners, she said. In order for orchid seedlings to mature, the vegetative portion of a fungus—the hypha—penetrates in between the orchid’s root cells or into the cells themselves. “Certain types of orchids rely on their fungal partners for chlorophyll and would perish without them. Exactly what the fungus receives in exchange is a bit of a mystery.”

  “It sounds like the Tibetan Yab Yum images,” Christiaan said, referring to the statues and thangka paintings of Tantric deities in symbiotic union.

  Soon afterward, we reached a line of cliffs that we could only cross by holding onto large vines that had grown across the rock. We had reached a sacred site called Tapak Né, where an image of Dorje Pagmo united with her Tantric counterpart, Tamding (in Sanskrit, Hayagriva) was said to have manifested spontaneously on the colossal boulder.

  In the Tantric view of life, the world is charged with the union of male and female energies, and the entwined form of Tamding and Dorje Pagmo (Ta-Pak) symbolizes the dynamics of the fully integrated psyche. Kawa Tulku stopped to perform a short ceremony, seating himself on the water-saturated ground.

  Graphic icons of nonduality, Tantric images inspire practitioners to transcend habitual divisions between subject and object. As Jesus reputedly instructed his disciples: “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same . . . then you will enter [the Kingdom].” As I tramped around the rock through oozing mud, I overheard Hamid explaining to Oy the explicit, if universal, symbolism. “Sexual passion masks a spiritual longing for an end to duality and a return to wholeness,” Hamid told her. “But unless there is intense presence the synergy can easily turn into compulsive grasping and the underlying sense of incompleteness remains. For true realization to arise in the heart and mind, these volatile energies must be fully encountered; only then does the illusion of separation disappear and transform into openness and radiant compassion. That’s why in Tantra, the chakras connected with these largely unconscious energies must be opened first; just as we have to journey into these nether regions of Pemako before we can enter the innermost gorge.”

  AS I WADED AROUND THE ROCK, I recalled a story that Bhakha Tulku had told me about a Tibetan nun whom he had met during his stay at Rinchenpung in 1956. The nun would disappear into the forests around Tapak Né for several days at a time, Bhakha Tulku related, and return as if intoxicated, bearing fruits and flowers that no one had ever seen before. No one had followed her on her journeys, but all assumed that she was attending Tantric tsok feasts in the halcyon realms of the dakinis—beyond the conventional limits of time and space. Later, as I walked through billowing vapors rising up from the valleys below us, I realized that I had not seen our own flower-bestowing Ani-la for the entire day.

  The Gillenwaters, eager to reach the imagined comforts of the monastery, had walked ahead with Kawa Tulku and the Monpa porters. When I reached a stream less than half an hour from Rinchenpung, I stopped to wash off the layers of mud that had encased my boots and gaiters. As I soaked in the birch-fringed waters, the blast of a distant conch shell roused me from my reverie. Kawa Tulku must have arrived at Rinchenpung, I thought. I set off to join the others.

  The gilt-roofed temple sits on the crest of a grassy spur in the center of a bowl-shaped hollow filled with marsh reeds and small plots of ripening barley. In the sacred geography of Pemako, we were now in the navel of the goddess.29

  AT DAWN ON THE NINTH DAY of the fifth month of the Wood Tiger Year (1794), the treasure-revealer Orgyen Dudrul Lingpa—better known as the Fifth Gampopa—who h
ad journeyed down the Tsangpo to open Pemako’s sacred sites, dreamed of a woman dressed in rags. The dakini instructed him to build a temple on a nearby hill “shaped like a heap of rice.” The spear-wielding tribes that hunted in the region of Rinchenpung resisted Gampopa’s plans, claiming that the sounds of the lamas’ drums and conch-shell trumpets would scare away the game. But with backing from the king of Powo, the Tibetans finally secured rights to the land through gifts of animals, woolen cloth, swords, knives, axes, and copper cooking utensils. Surrounded by valleys that fanned out like petals of a lotus, Rinchenpung gradually became the center of religious life in Pemako, propogating the spiritual lineages of the Fifth Gampopa and Jatsun Nyingpo.

  Hamid and I had visited Rinchenpung a year earlier after climbing up from Medok, the Chinese-occupied village perched on a plateau above the Tsangpo as it flows toward the Indian border only a short way downstream. Our requests to visit the temple had been refused and we had been forced to break away from our Chinese liaison officer, the beloved Gunn, and head into the jungle. To reach Rinchenpung, we climbed more than 3,000 feet above Medok, assaulted by leeches, stinging flies, and swarms of gnats. When we reached the top of the ridge, we entered a forest of flowering rhodedendrons, but no trail indicated the way toward the temple. At that moment, a hawk swept above us with a snake clutched in its talons. Lacking any better guide, we headed north in the direction from which the hawk had appeared.